I’ve had BWS for a while and have kept it up due to a foray into Linux, but I honestly haven’t gotten to know it that well.
I’m wondering how people have found it to work when using it in a more traditional DAW-ish way for longer pieces without clips/loops. I’m most familiar with Logic and find that it works well for that sort of thing. But I’m finding aspects of BWS interface work better for me than Logic’s, particularly since my vision is just not great. BWS scales well and just seems to feel better.
I am reading the manual, around one chapter per day, for both the timeline arranger and clip sequencer. I read it and ‘do’ what I read along in a sandbox project. It’s an eyeopener to me. It may give you some clues concerning your question.
Edit: this is a perfect question (‘how would you do X in Bitwig?’) for the new knowledge-sharing Bitwig community. See a recent post above here.
I mostly use the clip launcher as a place to store and organize clips and versions rather than play from it. The features I use the most are the arranger and device modulators which are very accessible and that’s why I’ve stayed with BW. Bitwig just wins any comparison that I’ve made that involves modulation and it makes all devices and VST’s feel more accessible. Keep looking to the left, that side pane holds a lot of useful info and features.
Bitwig is pretty good at this. Its arranger view has a lot of nice conveniences like being able to “focus” on groups and subgroups that makes longer pieces easier to manage. I don’t find its piano roll editor as refined as Logic’s, and there’s no scoring at all. But there’s something nice about the way Bitwig treats all sections on the arranger as “clips” that hold their own properties as opposed to how Logic splits this work into “Tracks” and “Regions”. And how Bitwig is therefore agnostic about whether a clip is MIDI or audio. As opposed to Logic where the two can’t mix.
Logic’s step sequencer regions, though, are really amazing and there’s nothing like that in Bitwig. Bitwig, on the other hand, has the better story when it comes to recording and manipulating expression. And its per-note-event operators are crazy!
Still, by and large, it’s not arranger stuff that’s going to win you over to one side or the other. They’re more or less equivalent. The real difference is that Bitwig has the Grid and all of those insane modulation points built in. Doing anything equivalent in Logic is awkward at best. This makes Bitwig a more creative and flexible tool when it comes to sound design/FX.
But Logic is, (IMHO) just much better at mixing and mastering tracks. So even when I sometimes start projects in Bitwig (if I’m going to want to get crazy with modulation or need a creative boost), I almost always finish in Logic.
Am I missing something or are you limited to a single 16 note phrase without any probability or trig conditions or anything else cool?
Compared to what you can do in logic it seems a bit limited.
Maybe because it’s a device meant to be modulated by the whole ecosystem of other devices and making it a clip instead would ruin that?
You talk as if the existence of a step device somehow rules out developing a step clip. But there’s no reason for the two to be mutually exclusive except for a lack of imagination.
Actually, Bitiwg went out of their way to say piano roll improvements are next on their list, so I guess there’s not much imagination involved, either?
Yes, and spend 2h building elaborate device chains and grid patches for something, that can be done in 5m in a clip…
Well, actually… They’re notorious for adding new stuff and almost never improving upon and finishing it, e.g. audio comping (no midi comping), operators (basic, can’t be mixed e.g. repeats with chance), no next actions for scenes, no reversible bounce-in-place, still no pitch-tracking modulator, automation editing remains archaic (unlike new stuff added for MSEG-s), they never expanded on the dedicated touch interface introduced in… v1.3
Not the first time, though. I’ll believe it when I see it. In fact I bought Bitwig license again lately and waiting to activate it for 6.0 (or whatever it’s going to be).
In 6+ years using Bitwig I never finished anything in it, because it makes it so easy to dig deep rabbit holes and get distracted.
shit, maybe someone here might be able to help me, im trying to use a tascam model 12’s midi out to control a quadraverb from bitwig, qverb is on midi ch 9 and has cc 71-78 assigned, i should be able to use the midi cc plugin to send signal from an instrument track to the qverb just by selecting tascam midi out as my note output, correct? i also tried using the hw instrument plugin and putting a midi cc on the note fx part of it but that didnt work either. any ideas of what else i could try?
model 12 is not/cant be in daw ctrl since im using a couple of the channels as send/return for the qverb
How would you use Stepwise in an actual arrangement? There’s no play/stop buttons to trigger it at specific time (e.g. in a middle of a bar), no patterns to build different variations, etc.
Of course, you can use Note FX Selector to get close, but it’s tedious and unnecessary - look how patterns are implemented in Logic, S1 or Cubase. If Stepwise was a clip type, you’d still be able to use modulators, operators and Note FX devices on it. But then you’d have way more additional features available, which are impossible or difficult now.
But it already does that. When you start playing in the middle of a bar (or anywhere in the bar) in the arrangement view, stepwise starts in the middle of the bar (or anywhere in the bar) too.
If you want multiple bars, multiple stepwise devices with an automation of their on off state would do the trick.
You can make different variations with the modulators too.
Nobody’s arguing that these devices are the same as using clips in the timeline, but they aren’t supposed to be.
For the record, I don’t think this step sequencer is one of their most exciting device additions but it’s in keeping with the general Bitwig approach of note creation and mangling devices it definitely has its uses. I think @antic604’s idea of a step sequencer clip type is a good idea though and it’s clearly had success elsewhere.
At the bottom of the “what’s new” page we have the following, so let’s see what happens.
What Comes Next?
We’re working on some fundamental workflow improvements to how you work on the Arranger and in the piano roll. Once this is polished and ready, you’ll see it in action with our next release.
Are they? This is not a rumor that I have seen. This topic seems like a waste of keystrokes unless you can support that the BW crew are incompetent or slacking off, which seems impossible. I’ve been frustrated at bugs sometimes but that was years ago and I don’t see a string of broken promises as you paint it out to be.
All they features you mentioned are non-issues or at best they are good feature requests (like a pitch tracking modulator). I don’t see a pattern in the points you brought up and the only complaint I share is that the touch interface with radial menus was a great idea that didn’t come to full bloom. Other than that I don’t think your argument is reasonable and I don’t know why you’re so disappointed, maybe you have a reason, I’ll let you keep it private even if I’m curious what is the source of all that agitation.
Many features in bitwig were groundbreaking improvements to DAW’s as a concept which is a feather in their cap. Is it realistic to expect that it will be compatible with everything in the future? Not at all, that’s not how software works in most cases.
I don’t think I need to elaborate any further. I already gave couple of examples of how they implemented a feature and left it “unfinished” or “incomplete” and how they keep doing that. Of course it’s debatable and highly subjective, and most of the time there’s native or 3rd party workaround available. And it’s not unique to Bitwig - literally ALL devs do that, leaving seemingly low-hanging-fruit improvements (e.g. why we still don’t have Ctrl+Alt+MW [on Windows] zooming the arrangement vertically???) on the table, because something else captured their attention.
It pains me more with Bitwig (hence the “aggitation”), because it’s special to me - the feature set, the workflow, even the looks are probably the closest to a perfect DAW for my particular needs & expectations, so I tend to be more disappointed with it than I am with similar “transgressions” elsewhere
I love it, it’s my absolute goto and of all the DAWs I’ve ever used: Sonar, Reaper, FL, Logic, it’s the one that gets me banging out more tracks than anything else.
The recent addition of really great drum machines built in has just been the icing on the cake.
See? This is exactly what “subjective” means - for me almost anything I touch in Bitwig screams 2-3 missing related features, which “clearly” should’ve been there but instead we get Pultec emulations or sub-par pattern sequencer. And don’t even get me started on 20+ drum devices
Still, I’m happy for you and I can 100% understand how someone can be super happy with Bitwig
…yeaaaah…speaking of meanwhile…some are always complaining and others just work with what’s in fron of them…
personaly, i can’t wait to get my hands and ears on these new pitch and frequency shifter PLUSSES, too…
this week, another glorious beta phase will end soon enough again…
